(A review of “The French Dispatch”)
The first Wes Anderson movie to truly disappoint, “The French Dispatch”, a movie about a fictitious newspaper, is better off left unread (or watched).
Whenever a new Wes Anderson movie is announced, if you are familiar with his oeuvre, you know what you are in for, a stylised character study that can only be described as Wes Anderson-y.
Bill Murray will be featured with an ever-increasing cast of regulars, all expertly playing characters that explore a restrained version of the many facets of the human experience.
Of course, there will be perfectly parallel framed shots, with some lateral dolly shots, immersive fabricated sets, with intricate details.
The soundtracks are filled with quirky oldies mixed with impeccable Mark Mothersbaugh scores which heighten the quirkiness but fit the overall mood of whatever movie you are watching.
Love him or hate him, Wes Anderson has never made a bad movie. Bottle Rocket, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, each had problems, but they were still worth watching.
With his latest film, The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson unfortunately has finally lost the plot.
The most Wes Anderson-y of all Wes Anderson films at this point, has devolved into self-parody.
The film is set in the aptly named, fictious French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which translates to boredom-on-apathy, which is exactly how I felt watching this movie.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle in a story titled, Review: Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’ is a star-studded flop published on Oct. 18, 2021, it states, “The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you know you are watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work.”
The attempt to shoehorn almost every actor Anderson has ever worked with, plus several more, makes it impossible to allow room for character development.
The cast reads as a who’s who of Hollywood elite and trendy tastemakers: Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Timothée Chalamet, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Léa Seydoux, Benicio del Toro, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartman, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Spiderman’s Tony Revolori, Henry Winkler, Anjelica Huston, Bob Balaban, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet and about 30 more. That list was as exhausting to write as it was to watch.
The movie instead seems to rely on the actors’ reputation or past work to inform the character than by anything written in the script.
The sets are overwhelming to a fault, which I realize is weird to say, but they are so detailed they are distracting and almost become another character.
Case in point, in one of the early scenes an employee is tasked with bringing Bill Murray’s character something to eat. The scene takes him nearly a minute to make his way to the top of the set (most likely a miniature), it feels more like five.
In a story from The New Yorker, which coincidently the movie is inspired by, titled “The French Dispatch,” Reviewed: Wes Anderson’s Most Freewheeling Film by Richard Brody Published Oct. 21, 2021, it states, ““The French Dispatch” contains an overwhelming and sumptuous profusion of details. This is true of its décor and costumes, its variety of narrative forms and techniques (live action, animation, split screens, flashbacks, and leaps ahead, among many others), its playful breaking of the dramatic frame with reflexive gestures and conspicuous stagecraft, its aphoristic and whiz-bang dialogue, and the range of its performances, which veer in a heartbeat from the outlandishly facetious to the painfully candid.”
That is to say the film is so busy that it distracts from the fact that there really isn’t a story, it’s all spectacle.
The film is set in the aptly named, fictious French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which translates to boredom-on-apathy, which is exactly how I felt watching this movie.
Not sure if Siskel and Ebert would be turning in their graves over a four-star review by Sheila O’Malley on Ebert’s webpage. She states, “the movie may be hard to explain, but it’s very fun to watch,” if only that were true.
Many writers and reviewers seem totally smitten with this movie. I’d like to know how many of Anderson’s previous movies they’ve seen.
The French Dispatch plays out like a student film where the class was tasked with separately making a scene in the “Wes Anderson style” then mashing all the segments together into one film.
Most scenes play out like something trying to capture the magic from a previous film but wholly missing the mark.
To be fair the film probably would have worked better if the different stories had been split up into separate short films.
It’s not all bad, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson are the best thing in the movie, which is disappointing that most of their acting is done in the first and best segment of the movie.
According to an Oct. 26, 2021 article by Roger Moore (not The Roger Moore) on Movie Nation titled Movie Review: Wes Anderson visits 1968 France via “The French Dispatch” it states, “Wilson is beret-wearing Herbsaint Sazerac, “The Cycling Reporter” who covers the city’s seamy side with the poetry of the pathological over-writer, delivering rhapsodic prose (each “reporter” acts out his or her “story” or essay) that is “impossible to fact check.”
The segment is actually funny and is the only part that truly lives up to Anderson’s claim that the movie is, “a love letter to journalists.”
If you are a Wes Anderson fan hopefully his next one gets back on track. If you are curious and have not seen one of his films, start with Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom or Fantastic Mr. Fox and skip this entirely.
